Shot in the Dark

Skål!

The “Pirate” party is poised to take power in Iceland..

…and then give it back:

Although the Pirate Party formed just four years ago, its popularity has skyrocketed — most likely for unconventional tactics aligning loosely with libertarianism — the promotion of privacy rights and personal freedoms, and simultaneous shrinking of Big Government.

Edward Snowden has been offered the safe haven of Icelandic citizenship should the Pirates likely victory come to fruition — which makes sense, given the party’s anti-establishment roots.

In fact, the Pirates have experienced astonishing success in a short time — taking the nation’s longstanding political traditionalists off-guard in the process — even the group’s founder, a programmer and former Wikileaks activist, is stunned.

The GOP needs to learn a few lessons from the Pirates.

I’ll  be here to teach ’em.

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Mitch Berg

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15 responses to “Skål!”

  1. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    Paging Jessie Ventura… 😀

  2. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Arg!

  3. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    How do you say “TRULBRT” in Icelandic?

    And now Assange just needs to make his way from the Ecuadorian embassy to the Icelandic embassy in London.

  4. DMA Avatar
    DMA

    I didn’t read anything in the article about them “giving it back”.

  5. Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco Avatar
    Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco

    The Icelanders are more subject to US diplomatic pressure than are the Ecuadorans. For example, we guarantee Iceland’s defense so they don’t need a navy.
    So the Icelanders give Assange sanctuary, we cancel our defense treaty with them, the Icelanders need a navy and raise taxes . . .

  6. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    IOBF, please tell just who will threaten Iceland? Besides Hillary, that is.

  7. Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco Avatar
    Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco

    The population of Iceland is a little less than the population of Minneapolis. They regularly have disputes with the Brits over Icelandic fisheries. I’m not saying that the US navy is going to go to war against the Brits over Icelandic fishing rights, but Iceland is a small country much more dependent on international norms, as enforced by the US, than is Ecuador.
    Iceland is a NATO country. Ecuador is not.

  8. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Nerdbert, Iceland is smack dab in the middle of the Russian Navy’s path into the Atlantic. Need I say more? It’s also an important “emergency stop” for airliners from North America to Europe. So Icelanders are stuck in a geopolitical storm not at all of their own making.

  9. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Yep, BB, it is. And I doubt they care either way. The US will defend Iceland out of its own self-interest if they’re ever attacked. Can you imagine the US actually refusing to defend Iceland even without a treaty? Not plausible given Iceland’s strategic location, so any threat by the US to cancel its defense “obligation” is laughable.

  10. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Unless, of course, the President either gave a hundred billion bucks to the chief supporter of terrorism, or concurs with that decision. No, Nerdbert?

    But you are right that in the end, that probably has little to do with Icelanders. It has to do with whether Americans elect criminal lunatics to the White House.

  11. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    And, BB, would you entrust your security to the promises of an American president any time soon? Especially someone who’s touting herself as Obama V2.0? Your “treaty obligations” are worthless if the CiC decides not to bother, and Obama/Clinton have shown that they have no honor, only political interest, so their “obligations” are worth less than the paper they’re printed on. THAT’s what got Poland et. al. so freakin’ worried.

  12. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    please tell just who will threaten Iceland? Besides Hillary, that is.

    One interesting subplot of Tom Clancy’s second novel, “Red Storm Rising”, involved the Soviet invasion of Iceland and the strategic implications it had on a general war in Europe.

  13. Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco Avatar
    Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco

    I expect that, if the Icelanders were to offer refuge to Snowden, they would find out very quickly that the phrase “diplomatic pressure” cover a range of things that would tend to deplete the pocketbook of the Icelandic government, as well as Icelandic citizens. They could always counter by offering to lease a harbor to the Russians. The point is that there would be a big price to pay for that warm, happy feeling of moral superiority.
    Also, wouldn’t Snowden merely be exchanging a big refrigerator for a small freezer? The average July max temp in Reykjavik is 57 F. Russia’s Black Sea resorts have actual palm trees.

  14. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    IOBF, they tried that kind of pressure with Iceland before, during the meltdown of 2008. Iceland refused to bankrupt themselves to pay off the debts of British/EU depositors and suffered a deep (but very short) recession because of the economic retaliation of the EU. They’re now back above where they were in 2008 economically because they made investors rather than taxpayers take the economic hit, which the rest of the EU can’t say. And, of course, they punished their banksters rather than bail them out.

    Somehow if the EU, Iceland’s biggest trading partner, couldn’t bring enough economic pressure to get Iceland to buckle under, I doubt the US can.

    And as for feckless abandonment, the US already unilaterally withdrew from Iceland back in 2006 despite Iceland’s government’s attempt to keep them around. Iceland hasn’t exactly had the US as a steady partner in NATO, and it’s only been this year that the US has returned to Iceland. It seems that the US views it needs Iceland more now that Russia is flexing their muscles in the North Atlantic, so I’d say it’s Iceland that’s holding the cards now.

  15. Prince of Darkness_666 Avatar
    Prince of Darkness_666

    Germany is in the process of trying to make guns legal again as well. Truth is stranger than fiction

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